Comprehensive Database of U.S. Voter Fraud Uncovers No Evidence That Photo ID Is Needed

A News21 analysis of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000 shows that while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.

Analysis of the resulting comprehensive News21 election fraud database turned up 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.

“Voter fraud at the polls is an insignificant aspect of American elections,” said elections expert David Schultz, professor of public policy at Hamline University School of Business in St. Paul, Minn.

“There is absolutely no evidence that (voter impersonation fraud) has affected the outcome of any election in the United States, at least any recent election in the United States,” Schultz said.

The News21 analysis of its election fraud database shows:

In-person voter-impersonation fraud is rare. The database shows 207 cases of other types of fraud for every case of voter impersonation.

“The fraud that matters is the fraud that is organized. That’s why voter impersonation is practically non-existent because it is difficult to do and it is difficult to pull people into conspiracies to do it,” said Lorraine Minnite, professor of public policy and administration at Rutgers University.

There is more fraud in absentee ballots and voter registration than any other categories. The analysis shows 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud and 400 cases of registration fraud. A required photo ID at the polls would not have prevented these cases.

“The one issue I think is potentially important, though more or less ignored, is the overuse of absentee balloting, which provides far more opportunity for fraud and intimidation than on-site voter fraud,” said Daniel Lowenstein, a UCLA School of Law professor.

Of reported election-fraud allegations in the database whose resolution could be determined, 46 percent resulted in acquittals, dropped charges or decisions not to bring charges.

Minnite says prosecutions are rare. “You have to be able to show that people knew what they were doing and they knew it was wrong and they did it anyway,” she said. “It may be in the end they (prosecutors) can’t really show that the people who have cast technically illegal ballots did it on purpose.”

Felons or noncitizens sometimes register to vote or cast votes because they are confused about their eligibility. The database shows 74 cases of felons voting and 56 cases of noncitizens voting.

Voters make a lot of mistakes, from accidentally voting twice to voting in the wrong precinct.

“I don’t think there is a mature democracy that has as bad of an elections system as we do,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of political science and election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. “We have thousands of electoral jurisdictions, we have non-professionals running our elections, we have partisans running our elections, we have lack of uniformity.”

Voter-impersonation fraud has attracted intense attention in recent years as conservatives and Republicans argue that strict voter ID laws are needed to prevent widespread fraud.

The case has been made repeatedly by the Republican National Lawyers Association, one of whose missions is to advance “open, fair and honest elections.” It has compiled a list of 375 election fraud cases, based mostly on news reports of alleged fraud.

News21 examined the RNLA cases in the database and found only 77 were alleged fraud by voters. Of those, News21 could verify convictions or guilty pleas in only 33 cases. The database shows no RNLA cases of voter-impersonation fraud.

Civil-rights and voting-rights activists condemn the ID laws as a way of disenfranchising minorities, students, senior citizens and the disabled.

In a video that went viral in June, Republican Mike Turzai, Pennsylvania’s House majority leader, spoke approvingly at a Republican State Committee meeting of the state’s new voter ID law “which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done.”

His spokesman said Turzai meant that Pennsylvania’s election would be fair and free of fraud because of the new ID law. Democrats, however, said Turzai meant the law, signed in March, would suppress Democratic votes.

According to Pennsylvania’s Department of State and the Department of Transportation, as many as 758,000 people, about 9 percent of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters currently don’t have the identification that now will be required at the polling place.

Even if 90 percent of those voters got the correct identification by Nov. 6, that still could leave 75,800 voters disenfranchised.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the ID law violates the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minorities, according to a July 23 letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele.

A coalition of civil-rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union has sued Pennsylvania in state court, arguing the voter ID law would deprive citizens of their right to vote. The trial began July 25.

In a pretrial document released by the ACLU, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, represented by the state Attorney General’s Office, could not identify any cases of voter impersonation at the polls.

A Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge upheld the photo ID law in August. The ruling is expected to be appealed.

Leading up to the trial, the state said it would offer no evidence that “in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania or elsewhere” or that “in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absence of a photo ID law.”

Pennsylvania officials, who responded to the News21 public record requests, also reported no cases of Election Day voter-impersonation fraud since 2000.

“This law is a solution solving a problem that does not exist,” Democratic state Sen. Vincent Hughes told an Aug. 1 teleconference hosted by New America Media, a group representing the ethnic media. Hughes called the law partisan and, echoing Turzai, said its purpose is “to elect Mitt Romney.”

The News21 database shows one of the rare instances of voter-impersonation fraud occurred in Londonderry, N. H., in 2004 when 17-year-old Mark Lacasse used his father’s name to vote for George W. Bush in the Republican presidential primary. The case was dismissed after Lacasse performed community service.

The database shows the nine other voter impersonation cases were in Alabama, California, Colorado, Kansas and Texas. All were isolated and showed no coordinated efforts to change election results.

Republican-dominated legislatures — with the exception of Rhode Island where Democrats passed a photo ID law — have considered 62 ID bills since 2010.

Only the Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Kansas measures are likely to be in effect in November.

Rhode Island’s more lenient law will take effect in 2014. Indiana and Georgia were the first states to pass strict voter-ID laws, enacted in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

Few laws regulate absentee ballots, although the News21 analysis shows this is one of the most frequent instances of fraud.

“It makes much more sense if you are trying to steal an election by either manipulating results on the back end through election official misconduct or to use absentee ballots which are easier to control and to maintain,” said Hasen, the UC, Irvine, professor of political science.

In 2003, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated East Chicago Democratic Mayor Rob Pastrick’s primary victory because of massive fraud. Pastrick, an eight-term incumbent, lost in a 2004 repeat election.

Forty-six people, mainly city workers, were found guilty in a wide-ranging conspiracy to purchase votes through the use of absentee ballots.

John Fortier, a political scientist at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said there are “more direct problems” with absentee ballots because the person casting the ballot can be pressured or coerced.

Keesha Gaskins, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a public policy group that opposed many of the voting-law changes nationally, recognizes that absentee-ballot fraud occurs more than other election fraud, but still doesn’t consider it a threat.

“There are more concerns in terms of absentee fraud but, again, it is easier to catch,” she said.

Minnite, the Rutgers University professor who researched election fraud from 2006-2010 for her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” agrees with Gaskins.

“Corruption works when it’s organized. If we see more cases of absentee-ballot fraud than, say, voter-impersonation fraud, it still doesn’t mean that voters individually are motivated to do it,” she explains. “It just means that absentee balloting might present some greater opportunities for people who are organizing conspiracies to corrupt elections.”

The News21 analysis shows 34 states had at least one case of registration fraud — many were associated with third-party voter registration groups.

The most noteworthy involved the voter registration group, Association for Community Organization and Reform Now (ACORN).

The group, which endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, became the target of conservative activist James O’Keefe, who produced deceptively edited videos that suggested ACORN employees were encouraging criminal behavior.

Voter-ID supporters often cite ACORN as evidence that voter fraud is a problem. The scandal resulted in at least 22 convictions in seven states and the collapse of the organization in 2010 after Congress and private donors pulled their funding.

Critics of third-party voter-registration say that workers who gather signatures are typically paid for their efforts and that’s an incentive to write in false names, breaking the law. Defenders of third-party registration say that establishing criteria for the number of signatures workers must gather in a day, for example, is good business practice. These so-called quotas, they say, are simply a way of establishing standards of performance and evaluating employees. *

Both sides of the debate agree voter-registration rolls are outdated and should be cleaned up. They disagree on whether problems with the rolls lead to fraudulent votes being cast.

“Mickey Mouse has been registered hundreds of times but Mickey has never turned up on Election Day to vote,” Hasen said. The News21 database shows 393 cases involving ineligible voters, typically felons, noncitizens or people voting in the wrong jurisdictions. There were guilty verdicts in 159 cases.

Sometimes, felons and non-citizens were not aware that they didn’t have voting rights, as in the case of Derek Little in Wisconsin, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The database shows the case was dismissed because prosecutors learned that Little identified himself at the polls with his prison ID.

Double voting occurs in isolated instances and often involves absentee ballots. However, few cases in the database reveal any coordinated effort to change election results. Often, the double vote was a mistake.

Claudel Gilbert, a Haitian immigrant in Ohio, who had changed his address, received two registration cards in the mail in 2006 and believed he had to vote in both places for his vote to count. In four other cases, people were accused of double voting for filling out their ballot and their spouse’s.

Some advocates of voter-ID laws say voter fraud is used to “steal” federal elections.

But the only so-called theft case in the News21 database involved four Indiana Democratic party officials accused in 2008 of forging signatures on petitions to get Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the state primary ballot. No one was convicted.

Many experts agree the elections system is inefficient and that this leads to mistakes and clerical errors that are lumped under “voter fraud.”

The News21 database showed that election-fraud cases often were the result of mistakes by confused voters or elections officials.

For example, Leland Duane Lewis, an 89-year-old from Raleigh, N.C., in 2011, requested — and got — a second ballot after mistakenly turning in his first one and realizing it was only half-completed.

Tom Brett, an election worker from Georgia, was accused in 2009 of not being on duty during early and absentee voting.

Schultz, the Hamline University professor who has written extensively about election fraud, said voting rules could be clarified for voters and there should be better training for election officials.

“If somebody is ineligible to vote because they are a felon, for example, or an ex-felon, making that clear to them, in terms of they can’t vote until such and such a time,” Schultz said. “And the same thing with election officials ... making it clear to them regarding what the rules are regarding who is eligible and who is not eligible.”

Many voter-ID supporters continue to argue that the measures are needed to prevent voter-impersonation fraud to ensure the integrity of elections, although fewer than five tenths of one percent of the total cases in the News21 analysis are voter impersonation.

Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based policy center, is a staunch supporter of voter-ID laws. He said “there’s no way to detect” voter-impersonation fraud unless states have voter-ID laws.

Bill Denny, a Mississippi Republican state representative elected in 1987, sponsored that state’s voter-ID bill — awaiting preclearance by the Justice Department — because he thinks voter impersonation is a problem even if there have been few prosecutions.

“Whether you have proof of it or not,” he added, “what in the heavens is wrong with showing an ID at polls?”

Minnite, the Rutgers professor, is worried that lawmakers could disenfranchise voters who don’t obtain the correct IDs and are prohibited from voting in November based on a problem that barely exists.

“Voter fraud is not a problem (so) the solution should not be to address voter fraud,” Minnite said.

She said it could be especially burdensome for poor people to obtain the correct documents to get an ID — even for a free ID that some states with new ID laws are providing.

Minnite asked whether voting rights for “thousands of people should be sacrificed … where there is absolutely no basis for (voter ID) in the first place.”

Civil-rights groups compare the voter-ID laws to Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and literacy tests designed to keep blacks from voting in the past.

“It’s simply a new big burden on the backs of people who just want to have their voices heard during elections,” said Eddie Hailes, managing director and general counsel of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group challenging voter-ID laws in Texas, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The Justice Department denied the Texas voter-ID law — which U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder likened to a poll tax— on the grounds that it would disproportionately affect minorities and the poor.

The state pre-emptively sued the Justice Department for the right to implement the law and arguments were heard by a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., in July. A verdict is expected within the next month.

Not all supporters of the laws think voter-impersonation fraud is a major problem. Not all opponents think the laws will suppress millions of votes.

Trey Grayson, the former Republican Kentucky secretary of state who is director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, supports voter ID but also thinks election reform should “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

He suggests voter-identification laws could be paired with Election Day registration.

“People who don’t get registered 30 days out could still come in and register on the day of the election,” he said. “And a voter ID, that could give you the confidence that this person really is who she says she is and allow her to vote.”

Grayson criticizes many opponents of voter-identification laws, suggesting that their focus on voter suppression may have an adverse effect on turnout.

“One of the criticisms I would have of the attorney general (Eric Holder) and others who have made this a big deal,” he said, “is, by raising the issue and the way they are raising it, rather than trying to go around and get people IDs, sort of raising the specter of all this, they may also be suppressing the vote with their reaction to it.”

Grayson said there is potential to have comprehensive election reform without partisan politics.

“You could take ideas from the left and the right,” he said. “You could have a better system.”

Alex Remington of News21 contributed to this article.

Natasha Khan was an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow this summer at News21.

* This paragraph differs from the original in order to clarify the pros and cons of third-party voter registration.

Exhaustive Database of Voter Fraud Cases Turns Up Scant Evidence That It Happens

By Corbin Carson | News21

Published Aug. 12, 2012, 10:41 a.m.

The specter of widespread election fraud has been the professed reason that 37 state legislatures have passed or considered voter identification laws since 2010. Those claiming that illegal votes threaten free and fair elections generally have cited only anecdotes and individual reports of alleged voter fraud.

As part of the News21 national investigation into voting rights in America, a team of reporters took on the unprecedented task of gathering, organizing and analyzing all reported cases of election fraud in the United States since 2000.

How big was this effort?

Over the course of this seven-month investigation, the News21 team sent out more than 2,000 public-records requests and spent nearly $1,800 on fees for records searches and copies of documents. The team also reviewed nearly 5,000 court documents, official records and media reports. The result is the most extensive collection of U.S. election fraud cases ever compiled.

And only 10 such cases over more than a decade were reported to News21 by election officials and prosecutors across the country. During that time, 146 million Americans were registered to vote.

What about the highly publicized list of voter fraud cases gathered by the Republican National Lawyers Association?

News21 began its data-gathering effort in January 2012 by reviewing the more than 300 cases of alleged voter fraud collected by the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA). For years, the RNLA has been urging strict voter-identification laws on the grounds of massive amounts of voter fraud, and in 2011 the organization released a survey of voter fraud cases in America. However, the News21 analysis showed that the RNLA cases, now totaling about 375 cases, consisted mainly of newspaper articles about a range of election issues, with little supporting evidence of actual in-person voter fraud.

Is this database complete?

No. Despite the huge News21 public-records request effort, the team received no useful responses from several states — for instance, the lone cases in the database from Massachusetts, Oklahoma , South Carolina and South Dakota all came from the RNLA survey. Even in states where some local jurisdictions responded, others didn’t. In addition, it is possible that some jurisdictions which did respond failed to include some cases. Another problem is that some responses News21 received were missing important details about each case — from whether the person was convicted or charged to the circumstances of the alleged fraud to the names of those involved. Still, with those caveats, News21 is confident this database is substantially complete and is the largest such collection of election fraud cases gathered by anyone in the United States.

What if errors or omissions are discovered in the database?

News21 is committed to correcting errors or adding details about cases when we learn of them. Click here to notify News21 about errors or missing cases of which you are aware. Please include details that can be verified by News21 — names, case numbers, jurisdiction, results, etc. Vague allegations — “I heard that people were being paid to vote for Candidate X in the last election” — can’t be verified unless an official authority has investigated and prosecuted or dismissed the case.

Aren’t public officials required to respond to public-records requests?

You would think so, but one of the lessons News21 learned from this effort is the substantial differences in public-records requirements and responsiveness across the 50 states. Even within a state, where all public officials presumably are operating under the same laws and rules, there often was wide variation in compliance. One county might respond quickly with a list of cases while the next would insist that its public records laws don’t require officials to respond at all.

How was the News21 public-records effort conducted?

In early May, the News21 team sent public-records requests to each of the 50 departments of elections or secretaries of state across the nation. The team also sent similar requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act to the District of Columbia Board of Elections, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. The request was simple: Please send information about any cases since 2000 involving election fraud, including the name of accused, the charges they are accused of and the disposition of the case.

The first hurdle was that every state runs elections in its own fashion, and many states control the election process through different agencies. After extensive follow-up telephone calls and messages, the News21 team began to receive responses. The most common response was a message saying that the election offices don’t track fraud and directing the request to the state attorney general’s office.

In early June, the News21 team sent requests to all 50 state attorneys general. Many of them in turn responded that they don’t track cases of election fraud and that the requests should go to every county district attorney in the state.

There are 3,145 counties in America. News21 emailed, faxed or phoned every county district attorney office in every state that indicated that was necessary, a total of more than 1,000 such contacts. In many cases, offices were contacted more than once in order to get questions answered and details filled in.

How responsive were officials to the public-records requests?

Some states and local jurisdictions responded quickly and efficiently. For instance, the Connecticut State Elections Enforcement Commission sent News21 a CD-ROM containing more than 1,200 files, representing every case the commission had heard since 2000. Most involved technical violations of various laws covering campaign finance reports and advertising, but the comprehensiveness of the response was remarkable and it logged more than 200 election violations.

Hundreds of officials responded with short notes — some handwritten, even coffee-stained — saying they had had no cases of fraud.

When jurisdictions did acknowledge cases of election fraud, the responses came with a level of detail that ranged from complete to deficient. Some responded only with summary data counting the number of cases but without any useful detail. Other jurisdictions sent pages of names but without any charges or results. Some states — California for example — cited laws that made it illegal for prosecutors to give the name of somebody who had been charged but not convicted of a crime.

For nearly all the data News21 received, there would be some vital piece of information that had been requested specifically but that was missing. News21 reporters then called back, seeking more detail as well as searching databases such as Google News and Lexis/Nexis for articles about the cases. Despite this effort, there are cases in the database that contain so little detail that they cannot be properly categorized as one kind of fraud or another.

What public-records obstacles were encountered?

Some jurisdictions insisted that their computer systems lacked the capability to search for election fraud cases. They suggested that if News21 would forward the names of the people in the cases of interest, they would find the information; the names, of course, were what News21 was seeking.

Dozens of jurisdictions flatly refused the requests, using variations of the disclaimer that their public-records law does not require them to create a document that does not exist, therefore the request is denied. News21 responded to these denials by arguing that the team was not asking that a new record be created, but rather for copies of existing records of election fraud prosecutions. Even so, some jurisdictions continued to resist giving responsive replies.

Another problem was a pass-the-buck response. The secretary of state or department of elections would refer News21 to the attorney general, who would refer the team to the county district attorneys, who would then refer back to the secretary of state or department of elections. It was similar at the federal level. The Department of Justice responded to a query by pointing News21 to the 93 U.S. Attorney's offices around the country; many of those offices, in turn, referred News21 back to the department.

In some cases, there even was organized resistance to answering the News21 requests. When North Carolina sent a summary without details, News21 queried the 44 district attorneys across the state and got a detailed response from one of them. But almost immediately, an official with the Administrative Office of the Courts intervened and told the others not to respond to the News21 request. Another example was the director of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association, who refused to give News21 the email addresses of those offices, and then wrote an angry email when a News21 reporter used another source to get that contact information.

Was there any cost to seeking the public records?

That depends on the jurisdiction. Many places responded without charge. Others insisted on payment in advance of fees that ranged from modest — $10 for copying fees — to the $60,000 that officials in an Idaho county said would be necessary to write a computer program to search their records. (The county then acknowledged that it was unlikely there were any such cases to be found.) News21 paid a total of nearly $1,800 to various jurisdictions, in amounts ranging up to the $800 for programming a search of Iowa’s database. (Iowa added that answering public-records requests was the “lowest priority” for the state.)

Generally, there was little bang for the bucks spent on those statewide public-records searches. The $320 paid to Virginia generated a listing of 77 cases, more than half of which were separate charges against one person. Pennsylvania got $200 for a search that produced seven cases.

How did News21 organize the responses received?

A master spreadsheet was created using Google Documents, which allowed team members to enter new cases as the information came in. A spreadsheet is just a table of columns and rows, where the columns are the variables and the rows are the individual cases. In the case of the News21 fraud database, the key variables were name of accused; state; year; type of accused (individual voter, campaign official, third party, etc.); category of accusation (in-person voter impersonation, absentee-ballot fraud, registration fraud, double voting, intimidation, etc.); status of the case (convicted, pleaded guilty, found not guilty, dismissed, etc.); and a short synopsis of the case with whatever details had been gathered.

A second spreadsheet was used to track when News21 sent public-records requests to each federal, state or local jurisdiction, the response and the follow-up.

In addition, News21 set up a Document Cloud site where readers can see all the documents that were gathered during the course of the investigation. Document Cloud is a Web service used by more than 300 journalism organizations to index, organize, annotate and share with the public the documents they gather for investigative stories. The News21 documents can be accessed here.

How does News21 define the different types of election fraud?

Inspiration for the News21 database of federal state and local election fraud came from studying earlier efforts by Rutgers University Professor Lorraine Minnite, who built a smaller database of federal cases for her 2010 book “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” and the Brennan Center for Justice, which analyzed a collection of election cases for its 2007 report “The Truth About Voter Fraud.”

A key distinction is between voter fraud and election fraud. News21 started with the definitions offered by Minnite in her book: “Voter fraud is the intentional deceitful corruption of the election process by voters. All other forms of corruption of the electoral process and corruption committed by elected or election officials, candidates, party organizations, advocacy groups or campaign workers falls under the wider definition of election fraud.”

From there, the subcategories in the News21 database grew to include a dozen kinds of illegal election behavior by any of four kinds of participants in elections – voters, election officials, campaign officials or third parties. See this table for details on how these were defined. The News21 definitions don’t always agree with definitions used by different jurisdictions. For instance, some places call it “voter impersonation” when someone is accused of sending in the absentee ballot of another person; under the News21 definition, that would be “absentee ballot fraud.”

Because so much rhetoric focused on voter ID has proclaimed it the cure for perceived election fraud, News21 paid special attention to verifying any cases that conceivably could have been stopped by strict requirements that would prove a voter’s identity. Such cases would involve someone who goes to a polling place on Election Day and impersonates a registered voter. That is different from, for instance, cases of registering to vote using false ID or filling in an absentee ballot for someone else.

The News21 database includes as many cases as could be found that had reached some level of official action: That is, someone was charged, an investigation was opened, a specific accusation was made against a named person.

Along with official records, News21 reporters looked for news media accounts of such accusations, and then made all efforts to contact elections officials to find out what happened in those cases. In some cases, such as 71 of those from the RNLA survey, no official record could be found beyond a media report; these still were included in the database.

The News21 Election Fraud effort was organized and led by Corbin Carson, who designed the database and kept track of the public-records requests and responses. Sarah Jane Capper and Alex Remington led the research teams, which included Kassondra Cloos, Andrea Rumbaugh, Natasha Khan, Lindsey Ruta, Jeremy Knop and Ethan Magoc. The entire News21 team assisted in entering and fact-checking massive amounts of data.